I recently interviewed iconographer Nathan Hicks about where his interest in iconography started, his apprenticeship, and the opening of his own icon studio.
Nathan: You have an icon studio called Pilgrim Iconography. I'd like to talk with you about how you became an iconographer. Were you always interested in art?
Art has always been a passion of mine, so yes. I've been drawing ever since I could remember, and started trying to draw comics around the age of eight. I was a huge fan of Spider-Man, and my parents probably saved all my old comics that I'd made. I was a huge fan of Calvin and Hobbes, as well as Star Wars. At eight I'd decided to become a comic book artist.
When were you first introduced to iconography and how did that affect your vocational aspirations?
I've been around iconography in some way, shape, or form for my entire life. My father has an icon of Saint Nicholas that's been hanging on our wall since before I was born. It was that I was so caught up in what I was doing that I didn't really take the time to look. It wasn't until I was fifteen and saw Father Tom's iconography that I realized the potential for beauty and truth that iconography had. Right then I decided that iconography was what I wanted to do, and the rest, as they say, is history (well, history that I'm going to relate to you anyway).
Father Tom being Father Thomas Loya of Annunciation of the Mother of God Byzantine Catholic Church in Homer Glen, Illinois?
How did you come to see his iconography and what was it that made such a profound impression upon you?
Yes, Father Tom of Annunciation. He's a great man, and I can only hope to be half the man that he is. I started going to his church at fifteen, and the reaction that I had to those walls... someone had to yank me out of the church cause they saw I was about to start shouting in excitement.
One of the central tenets of iconography is that beauty and truth are connected on a profound level. This was something that I'd known long before I'd learned it from iconography. I honestly think it was the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes that first introduced the idea to me. There are so many moments in that comic that are hilarious, beautiful, and true, that I couldn't help but notice on some intuitive level that they seemed to be connected. When I saw Father Tom's work it was the most beautiful art I'd seen in my entire life, and therefore the most true. There was something in the way that Father used the color white that was amazing, and I found myself wanting to imitate that.
